My dear faithful readers. I’m terribly sorry about the recent trouble on The Beta News.

I did an update a few days ago, unfortunately it messed up my .htaccess file. I’ve fixed that and everything is back to normal again.

Well it is until I hit the “Update” button and update this blog to WordPress 2.7.

I’ll see you on the other side.

When I asked Leo Babauta from ZenHabits to Show Me Your Desktop, I didn’t know that I was about to set The Beta News record. With 4,298 views this is the most viewed page on The Beta News.

It’s only fair that I help Leo Babuta and friends to spread the word about their latest project called: Train for Humanity.

Over the past five years, 200,000 civilians have died due to violence, malnutrition, and disease in Darfur and an additional 2.2 million people have been displaced. We want to do something about it.

Fed up with watching humanitarian crises on the evening news and not doing anything to help, a group of bloggers (most notably, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits) have created and founded the non-profit Train for Humanity, which is an online humanitarian awareness and fundraising organization.

Over 150,000 new blogs are added to the internet everyday. Train for Humanity’s mission is to utilize the web, social media, and blogging, in tandem with athletes in training, to support organizations that help prevent suffering and alleviate the pain of children, orphans, and refugees who have been displaced due to genocide or internal strife and war within their country.

Quite simply, they believe – getting fit + social media + blogging = social good

The three pilot project athlete-bloggers, Mark Hayward, Dan Clements, and Leo Babauta are hoping to raise awareness for the current crisis in Darfur and funds for the organization Darfur Peace and Development. All three are training for endurance events of varying distances ranging from a triathlon to a marathon.

They hope to show people that with a little creativity and innovation, anyone can assist and make a difference in the world. If you would like to learn more, have a look at the Train for Humanity website and please consider sponsoring one of them or spreading the word.

One white page. One textbox. One button. And the information of the world is at your feet. I do have one suggestion for Google though, call it my birthday present.

On September 7th Google celebrated its 10th birthday. Google was named by its two young Stanford University electrical engineering graduate students in misspelt homage to the word “googol” – an infinity-like number denoting 10 to the power of 100 (that’s the number one followed by a hundred zeros).

The simple design and usability of Google.com is one of the main reasons, why Google is so big today. Searching using Google is really simple and everybody loves simple.

Even the smallest company can rank high on Google searches, and who doesn’t trust a company that ranks high in Google?!

Besides simplicity, good search results and a consistent design through all of Google’s applications, Google Adwords is probably the smartest thing ever.

I’m used to ignoring banner ads, but text-based ads are harder to overlook, but this post isn’t about Google applications such as Google Chrome or Adwords.

It’s a present to Google.

Here is comes: Google – Please remove the “Do you feel lucky”-button from Google.com. This will make it even more simple and user friendly.

I know, you’ve probably never heard it before, but I don’t know anyone who uses that button.

Bonus question: Considering how much Google has achieved and how they’ve changed the internet for the last 10 years. How will Google shape the world for the next 10 years?

Happy birthday Google from The Beta News.

Thanks to my good friend Dan from Minute44.com, I’m now the proud owner of a iPhone icon. Well The Beta News are.

If you go to www.thebetanews.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you will see the cool new logo.

I’ve also added the Disqus plugin. I’m looking forward to using it. The plugin supports both Seesmic video comments, threaded discussion and better controls of your own comments.

Let me know what you think of it.